II.

THE LAND'S END.

Something like what Jerusalem was to the pilgrim in the Holy Land, the
Land's End is--comparing great things with small--to the tourist in
Cornwall. It is the Ultima Thule where his progress stops--the shrine
towards which his face has been set, from the first day when he started
on his travels--the main vent, through which all the pent-up enthusiasm
accumulated along the line of route is to burst its way out, in one long
flow of admiration and delight.

The Land's End! There is something in the very words that stirs us all.
It was the name that struck us most, and was best remembered by us, as
children, when we learnt our geography. It fills the minds of
imaginative people with visions of barrenness and solitude, with dreams
of some lonely promontory, far away by itself out in the sea--the sort
of place where the last man in England would be most likely to be found
waiting for death, at the end of the world! It suggests even to the most
prosaically constituted people, ideas of tremendous storms, of flakes of
foam flying over the land before the wind, of billows in convulsion, of
rocks shaken to their centre, of caves where smugglers lurk in ambush,
of wrecks and hurricanes, desolation, danger, and death. It awakens
curiosity in the most careless--once hear of it, and you long to see
it--tell your friends that you have travelled in Cornwall, and ten
thousand chances to one, the first question they ask is:--"Have you been
to the Land's End?"

And yet, strange to say, this spot so singled out and set apart by our
imaginations as something remarkable and even unique of its kind, is as
a matter of fact, not distinguishable from any part of the coast on
either side of it, by any local peculiarity whatever. If you desire
really and truly to stand on the Land's End itself, you must ask your
way to it, or you are in danger of mistaking any one of the numerous
promontories on the right hand and the left, for your actual place of
destination. But I am anticipating. Before I say more about the Land's
End, it is necessary to relate how my companion and I got there, and
what we saw that was interesting and characteristic on our road.

The reader may perhaps remember that he last left us scrambling out of
reach of the tide, up the cliffs overlooking Kynance Cove. From that
place we got back to Helston in mist and rain, just as we had left it.
From Helston we proceeded to Marazion,--stopping there to visit